I wonder what you think, how you react, when someone starts talking about creativity or being creative. Maybe your mind immediately jumps to paints or fabric or wood, and what you could do with them. Maybe the phrase “creative accounting” springs to mind. Perhaps you shut down completely, believing that you aren’t creative and that […]
I’m quite a fan of science fiction, reading it and watching it on TV and films. I love the way it opens up ideas and allows us to explore “what-ifs”. One of my favourite science fiction short stories describes the way in which a group of scientists invented an anti-gravity machine. At the beginning of […]
This time last year, I was standing here telling you a couple of stories about tent pegs, and about how I felt that God might be encouraging us as a church to enlarge the place of our tent, to spread out, to lengthen the cords. I had no idea that this would mean enlarging out […]
A few weeks ago I arrived home from leading the Sunday service to find an email waiting for me. In the service we had sung “Strength will rise as we wait upon the Lord.” and I had prayed using a phrase something like “we want to wait on You this morning, Lord”. The person who […]
In the reading from John’s eye witness account of the good news of Jesus that Doug read for us earlier, we heard Jesus speaking to his disciples. The occasion is a meal, one of many that he would have shared with his friends, but this one was different. This is the last supper that Jesus […]
This morning the sermon is going to be a little bit different. Normally I spend most of the time talking about the passages and then make a couple of quick suggestions for how we might put them into practice. This morning it’s going to be the other way round. We’ve been exploring our church’s value […]
I wonder if you’ve heard the one about the bride preparing for her wedding. She was anxious that she’d forget what order things would happen in during the service, particularly at the beginning when she would be in a bit of a daze. She talked to the vicar about this, and she calmed her down […]
So, we’re starting this term with a couple of sermons looking at big issues that have come up over the last six months or so. This week we’re thinking about Covid-19, and next week we’re going to look at Black Lives Matter, and the challenges of racial inequality. I know that some of you feel […]
When I was at theological college, we had preaching classes. In one of these, the lecturer showed us clips from four different films, each depicting the scene that we’ve read about this morning. So many film makers have given us their version of this story, ranging from Charlton Heston in the 10 Commandments all the […]
As I was thinking about this morning’s theme, and the ideas of laziness and diligence that we’re exploring today, I was aware of this real tension that we have to keep hold of as we’re talking about them. On the one hand we’ve got lots of warnings in the Bible about the dangers of laziness, […]